He went back into his office, trying to shrug away his melancholy in a determination to get on with his work. There was a murder to occupy him: the death of this girl Kate Wharton. He had always felt a little guilty about the way he relished a murder investigation, though he knew that it was only the hunter’s instinct which every successful CID officer must have. There wasn’t much to go on yet in this one. But this hunt more than any other must conclude with an arrest.
This might be his very last murder.
Five
The next morning was overcast, with enough nip in the air to remind everyone that this was still an English spring, even if it was the ninth of May. Bert Hook picked Mrs Julie Wharton up at nine o’clock to take her to identify the body of her murdered daughter.
She was ready for him, so that she had no need to invite him to re-enter the quiet house. But DS Hook had looked up the row of small rear gardens as he turned into the road, and his observant policeman’s eye had noticed a line of washing behind the house of Mrs Wharton. A line which contained men’s underwear, socks and shirts. So it seemed that this enigmatic woman probably did not live alone. There was a man about the place, though she had volunteered no information about his presence on the previous day.
She wore a dark blue coat above sheer nylon tights and navy shoes, dressed as decorously as if she were bound for a funeral. But there were no signs of distress about her appearance or her bearing; she was as carefully made up as on the previous day beneath her neatly cut dark hair. She said, ‘I could have driven there myself, you know. There was no need for you to collect me.’
Bert smiled. ‘We like to give what little support we can. This can be a distressing experience.’ He wondered if she realized that he was curious to detect how she really felt about this dead daughter, that he did not accept the emotionless front she had presented on the previous afternoon.
Whatever her thoughts, she revealed little about herself on the way to the mortuary, and Bert was too conscious of the stressful nature of the task ahead to press her to speak. She volunteered the information that she had not seen Kate for ‘at least a month’ before her death, and he deduced, though she did not put it into words, that there had been little intimacy between mother and daughter.
He wondered when and how the relationship had gone astray. Bert, a late entrant to the lottery of marriage, was the father of two boisterous boys and no daughters, but he had always thought that the mother-daughter bond was the strongest of all ties, the one most likely to survive the traumas of adolescence. So he presumed that the quiet, contained woman beside him had been close to the dead girl at one time, that something quite serious must have occurred to fracture the relationship.
But he gained nothing from Julie Wharton, who behaved as though the coolness between mother and daughter, which she had tacitly suggested, was the most natural thing in the world. He glanced sideways at her as he turned into the neat, aseptic surrounds of the mortuary and parked the police Mondeo beside the only other two cars which were there. If she felt any inner turmoil at the approaching ordeal, she gave no sign of it. She stared straight ahead at the brick walls of the low building; the profile of her strong, square face might have been cast in bronze.
The attendant outside the identification room was more nervous than she was. He was not used to meeting such composure in the close relatives of the corpses which were the centre of his working world. He fretted a little over the completion of the familiar forms, showed her unnecessarily where she would sign in due course, stumbled a little as he explained the procedure. Hook could have sworn there was a little impatience in the nods with which Julie Wharton acknowledged his instructions.
It was Hook who asked her the final routine question. ‘Would you like a moment or two alone before you see the body?’
‘No.’ It seemed almost an afterthought, a gesture towards convention, when she said, ‘I’d like to get this over with as quickly as possible, please.’
They had done a good job in the pathology lab in tidying up the corpse, using the girl’s plentiful hair to disguise the stitching at the front of the skull where the skin had been drawn back to allow entry to the head. The woman before them looked younger than her years, almost girlish in the absence of even the smallest of lines from the face. She looked, as Julie Wharton had said when she studied the photograph of the dead woman on the previous afternoon, almost as if she were asleep.
The emotion which had been held in check in the mother for almost an hour did not burst through with the revelation of the corpse. Perhaps, Bert Hook thought with a chill, it did not even exist.
The mortuary attendant drew the sheet back carefully from the dead face, careful not to expose the livid marks about the neck which gave the clue to how she had died. Bert Hook, standing unobtrusively behind the mother, did not hear the gasp of horror or distress he had expected. There was a slight tensing of the square shoulder blades in front of him, but no sound. Then Julie Wharton’s voice said calmly, ‘Yes. That’s Kate. I’ll sign those identification papers now.’
She was, he decided, the calmest of the trio in that cold and silent room. She refused the offer to allow her a few minutes alone with all that remained of her daughter, turned away as the still face was covered again, signed the papers, refused the offer of a hot drink, and was back in the police Mondeo within five minutes.
Neither of them spoke for some time as Hook drove her carefully home. Eventually he said, ‘It’s a distressing business, always, the identification, but it has to be done.’
‘I understand that.’
He searched hard for some consoling words. ‘When it’s a road accident death, it can sometimes be really harrowing.’
He wanted to bite his tongue off at the crassness of this, but all she said was, ‘I can imagine it would be.’
He gave up any attempt to offer consolation and concentrated on the road. Just when he had decided she would not speak again, she said, ‘What about the funeral? Do I have to make arrangements?’
A strange way of framing the question, he thought. Most relatives wanted to know when they could conduct the ritual of mourning which was the last gesture to the dead: this woman spoke as if it were some kind of imposition. He said, ‘I’m afraid you may not be able to arrange the funeral for some time, Mrs Wharton. There’ll be an inquest, and even then the coroner probably won’t release the body for burial or cremation. That usually has to wait until — well until —’
‘Until there’s been an arrest?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, the defence lawyers have a right to ask for a second post-mortem by their own pathologist, if they want to dispute the findings of the first one.’
‘I see.’ She nodded thoughtfully, seemingly not at all upset by the idea of the body being stored for months and then opened up again.
When they drove into the row of neat, anonymous houses, she was out of the car before he could ease his own solid frame from the driving seat. She thanked him for the lift, as politely as if they had been out shopping.
It was only after she had shut the door of the house behind her that he realized she had still not asked how her daughter had been killed.
It was DI Rushton who took the call, sitting at his computer in the murder room beside the golf course. ‘They gave me the number at Oldford police station. Said you were the person I should contact.’
The voice was confident, used to the phone, educated, without the local accent of Herefordshire or Gloucestershire, certainly without the thicker rural burr of the Forest of Dean. Rushton put on the interested but neutral voice he reserved for members of the public. ‘What can I do for you, sir?’
‘Well, it’s probably nothing.’ The opening any CID man had heard hundreds of times. ‘But I thought it was something you should know about.’
‘Who are you, please?’ said Rushton politely, his hands poised over his computer keyboard.
‘Sorry! My name is Jason Gil
lespie. I’m a Catholic priest. I run a care centre in Gloucester, St Anne’s House.’
‘I know it, Father. To be strictly accurate, I know of it, and something about the work you do, but I’ve never been there. Well, you think that you have something which relates to our investigation, or you wouldn’t have been put through here.’
‘Yes. It may be nothing, as I say, but I thought I’d better report it. You never know quite how much attention to pay to addicts.’
Rushton took a swift decision. ‘I think I’d better come over and see you. This would be better done face to face.’
‘I must confess that I’d find it easier, if you could spare the time.’
‘I’ll just get someone else to take over here. I’ll be over early this afternoon.’
There was always time, when the crime was murder. Always resources: even the bureaucratic straitjackets of overtime were not powerful enough to constrain murder investigations. And for an inspector fiercely conscious of his career prospects, the chance to unearth an addict who had strangled Kate Wharton was immensely attractive.
***
DI Rushton left the murder room at Ross Golf Club and arranged for a detective sergeant to take over temporary responsibility for assembling the information coming in from house-to-house and other enquiries. At the same moment, the captain of another golf club, eight miles away at Oldford, was concluding his Wednesday morning four-ball game with his friends.
They knew each other well, these four men. All of them were just over sixty and recently retired or semi-retired. Richard Ellacott had his own accountancy business and still went in two days a week to deal with a few of his old accounts. Since he was this year’s Captain of Oldford Golf Club, he was appearing in the office even less frequently, in order to give full and conscientious attention to his duties at the golf club.
In truth, these were not onerous. Oldford was a small club, less prestigious and less demanding of its Captain’s time than a club like Ross. Ellacott could probably have joined Ross, but he was comfortable at Oldford, and his golf was mediocre enough for him to recognize that he might not have enjoyed the longer and trickier course at Ross. He had played there often in club matches, and had never been able to command the straight hitting which the course demanded.
And if he was honest, he knew he would never have become Captain there, whereas his long membership at Oldford had more or less ensured that the honour would come his way in time. He was enjoying the captaincy of this smaller club, basking in the kudos it gave him as he moved around the clubhouse and spoke to members, displaying what he thought of as an easy panache among the ladies when he played with them in mixed competitions.
Yet this morning, when they had showered and changed after the golf, he was not his normal ebullient self with his companions. He was first at the bar and bought his round of drinks, but the normal banter among the four who had played seemed to pass him by. When they twitted him about the two-foot putt he had missed to win the sixteenth, he grinned weakly and failed to come up with his normal unprintable riposte. It seemed to his partner, who had lost money by his Captain’s omission, that he scarcely remembered the moment. Which for any golfer anywhere would have been mighty unusual.
Richard Ellacott must have had something on his mind, but no one was certain what it was.
Even his greetings to members coming into the club were abnormally muted. He responded rather than taking the initiative, as he usually did. At his own table, he paid his pound on their modest wager without his customary complaints about the handicaps of the opposition. And he switched to halves after the first pint. Something was clearly preoccupying the Captain.
His companions shrugged the thought aside in the noisy hilarity which surrounded their after-match drinks. They came here to enjoy themselves, and they usually succeeded. If Richard Ellacott was a little out of sorts today, they weren’t going to let that stop them savouring their beer, toasted sandwiches and exuberant conversation. You might not be able to play golf like Tiger Woods, might even in your sixties be on the downward slope of golfing achievement, but you could enjoy this part of the day more than ever, especially when you could savour the thought that other people were at work.
Had they been a little more observant, they might have noticed that their Captain was watching the progress of the Oldford Gazette around the lounge bar. The club had it delivered every Wednesday, just as it took the Daily Telegraph each morning for the benefit of its members. Today far more members than usual picked up their local rag and gave close attention to its front page, where the body which had been found on the neighbouring course at Ross-on-Wye got full coverage.
When his companions had left and the clubhouse was almost empty, Richard Ellacott sauntered over to the bar, where the steward had just put down the paper before going away to connect up another keg of lager. He glanced carefully around to make sure he was not observed and then took the Oldford Gazette away to an armchair in the corner.
He read the coverage of the murder very carefully. The police had not yet released a picture of the dead girl, but there were large photographs of the spot where she had been discovered on the eleventh hole at Ross golf course, with quotations from members and speculation about how long the body had been lying there before it was discovered. Foul play was definitely suspected and enquiries were proceeding, but there was as yet no sign of an arrest.
The police knew nothing yet, then. Or nothing they were prepared to release to the local newshounds. The slightly smudged print gave an impression of great haste, as if the paper had held back its deadline to include the tremulous prose with which it greeted this local sensation. Richard Ellacott went over everything twice, finding it curiously consoling that there was no mention of his name anywhere in these hastily compiled columns.
He had not expected anything, of course. Perhaps the police would never even come to see him. He drove home to his wife with a dozen greenhouse carnations, and gave her conversation more than his usual attention.
Six
Chris Rushton locked his car carefully outside St Anne’s House in Gloucester. The big, shabby house was in the red-light district and he was glad that it was daylight now. He was relieved also as he went into the place that he was in plain clothes. The people he saw moving about in the place were the sort who would have shown instant hostility to a police uniform.
It was easy enough to distinguish the voluntary helpers from the clients the place was trying to help. An elderly woman was listening patiently to a white-faced, shifty-looking man who was almost six feet tall and looked as if he weighed less than nine stones. She directed Rushton to Father Gillespie’s room without a curious glance and turned back to the man who looked as if he would not live out the year.
The inspector found the priest kneeling in prayer with an emaciated girl, who was probably eighteen but looked fourteen. Rushton stood awkwardly outside the open door until they had finished. Father Gillespie must have been aware of him, but he did not divert his attention from the girl. He said as they stood up, ‘You were fine today, Annie. You ate enough to keep body and soul together. And we’ve just given a little food to your soul, haven’t we? I think you’ll find Eileen downstairs. Have a talk with her and see what she feels about things.’
The girl nodded, then retreated through the door without a word, keeping her front towards the priest like one retreating from a royal personage. She would have backed into Rushton if he had not stepped quickly aside. Once in the passageway, she turned without looking at the inspector and moved away in a rapid shuffle, with the heels of her slippers never leaving the ground.
The priest was small and wiry. He wore baggy, stained trousers and was in shirt sleeves; a dog collar sat oddly above an old sleeveless pullover. He looked at the girl’s retreating back for a moment, then shook his shoulders and made a visible effort to change roles and speak to Rushton. ‘Jason Gillespie.’ He held out his hand. ‘Father Jason Gillespie, as you can see from the dog collar. I tried to do
without it, when we started this place, but our guests like it. They like a clergyman to wear his badge, so that they know where they stand. It’s saved me from being thumped, more than once. Old habits die hard, even when life gets desperate.’
Chris Rushton accepted the firm handshake, already after the briefest of views filled with admiration for a man doing good work he knew he could never have done. ‘You said you had something to tell me,’ he prompted awkwardly. ‘Something connected with the murder of Kate Wharton.’
‘That’s her name, is it? Poor girl.’ There was something more than conventional regret in the phrase.
The priest was probably about forty, but he looked older because, despite a determinedly cheerful face and bearing, there was an infinite sadness for the fallibility of human nature in his wide brown eyes. He said, ‘I’ll need to tell you a little about the way we operate here, so bear with me. We aim to get our visitors off the streets and into eventual detoxification. We provide accommodation, a meal together at one o’clock each day, a day-centre for those who want to visit but not stay here. We tend to get people who haven’t any sense of belonging — most of them from adolescence onwards. We try to give them the family environment they don’t have, a feeling of trust and respect.’
‘Are most of your clients — sorry, visitors — young people?’
‘About half and half. We try to separate young people from older users. They are more reclaimable. But we measure success in a different way from the world at large. If someone this week has only taken cocaine three times instead of seven, that is an achievement we applaud. If someone accepts a detoxification programme and sticks to it, that is a triumph.’
‘So most of your visitors are drug addicts.’
‘Most, but not all. Some are young people who’ve spent virtually all their lives in the care of the social services, others are no longer in contact with their families. They tend already to be petty criminals. But some are just unable to cope with the deal life has given them. Annie, whom you saw leaving just now, nearly died from anorexia. Someone carried her here from a squat.’
Death on the Eleventh Hole Page 4